"ABSTRACT
The National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) was created by Executive Order in April 1994 to facilitate the documentation and
dissemination of digital spatial information on the Internet by U.S. Federal agencies. The Executive Order lays out a tight
timeframe in which descriptive information about digital map data (metadata) must be placed on-line to reduce duplication of
effort and to improve access to the digital information. World-Wide Web (WWW) and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS)
software are being used in an NSDI Clearinghouse effort to collect, geographically index, post, and serve digital spatial metadata
-- and in some cases the actual digital map files -- to the Internet.
This Clearinghouse project is being conducted in conjunction with the GeoWeb project conducted at the State University of New
York at Buffalo and with the Alexandria Project, a recently approved project under the Digital Libraries Initiative of the National
Science Foundation, primarily housed at the Map and Image Library of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Coordination
of these similar activities provides a diverse set of application domains through which the electronic publication of spatial data
can be addressed in a consistent manner. Through use of existing standards these projects seek to develop a consistent but
distributed on-line digital spatial data resource."